Recent reviews by Defcon The Straydog

We don't always get a good Warhammer 40.000 game. We don't always get an RPG that perfectly meshes tabletop mechanics with a video game. We have both here.

What you need to know about Space Marine 2:

- It is pretty in line with its predecessor, which was an old God of War-style violence orgy.
- It released with a full campaign and story.
- It released with a working co-op story, separate co-op game mode and PVP.
- It has little to no game-breaking bugs, there is an annoyance here and there but none of it will break your experience in half.
- The roadmap is beautiful, and includes the return of the Horde Mode, something the fans of the series wanted to be back.
- The season pass and the DLC content is purely cosmetic and the game does not lock you behind a paywall for missions, enemies, gear, or anything that would affect the gameplay in capacity.
- The team is working to iron out anything that was annoying, their first major balancing patch right out the gate smoothed out the already great gameplay loop by not nerfing good stuff to the ground but helping classes that are in need of it and toning down infuriating enemies.
- The story is quite good, you're recommended to play the first one but it is not necessary. It is a straightforward power fantasy done gracefully.
- The game is incredibly faithful to the 40K universe.

Sony has cancelled their decision to move forward with the PSN linking.

Commence Operation Phase II: Due Justice.

Adding a positive review because the game is bomb. It's amazing. Review bombing ceases now.

[Review after the first mission]
If you are a fan of old-school offerings from the Turn Based Strategy genre then this one might scratch an itch that very rarely gets attention from the industry these days.

Shields of Loyalty is a sort of hex-crawling turn based strategy game where (at least so far in the EA) you take command of a legendary folk hero and duke it out with various undead and demons and other varieties of classic fantasy baddies. You can think of this game as the strategy equivalent of the titles from the boomer-shooter revival we've been seeing in the recent years.

The gameplay loop is simple in a sense that it is good. Most strategy players absolutely crave depth but developers tend to mistake clunkiness and bloat with depth, leading to a ton of gameplay choices by the player that ultimately lead to not much happening in terms of the outcome. A lot of that flashy but unnecessary fat is trimmed here.

You have your terrain features and then you have your adjacency bonuses. The archers provide covering fire or supressing fire to the units adjacent to them depending on whether they hit or get hit, cavalry tanks for the other units by redirecting a portion of the attacks they take etc. Their hit rates, mobility attributes and the like get modified by the terrain type they are sitting on. Units also have some activated abilities that vary between them so you can mix and match your tactics, form formations, chain adjacency bonuses and try out different ways to fight.

Then you have your "downtime" where you can train certain units type to unlock them in kind of pokemon evolution way as most of the upgrade tree seems to be the "the previous guy, but better".

There are ambushes, clearing out settlements, looting said settlements, deploying and redeploying units with your general gameplay revolving around keeping your lynchpin hero alive throughout the missions and succeeding at the current task.

As for the aesthetic, it sits somewhere between WHFB and HoMM, so fantasy but not outright Herohammer by abandoning the medieval feel and going full-on fantasy.

If you're looking for a story-driven strategy game that won't need your commitment for 700 turns to get a conclusion out of it and just kill a bunch of skeletons the skeleton of a pretty decent game (get it?) is here and it is pretty playable right now. There's a cool base to build upon.

I like a solid boomer shooter, even though I'm not exactly a connosieur of the genre. What I know a good deal about, however, is Warhammer 40K.

This thing is a labour of love no matter where you look at it from; solid action, nice level design albeit a little too labyrinthine, and some things about the WH universe that wasn't used before.

This game has you fighting against some of the most underused units in the 40K universe like Foetid Bloat Drones, Flamers and Plague Toads, it has Toughness and Strength scores for weapons and enemies, you get use a Volkite Caliver AND a Grav-Cannon on top having a dedicated Taunt button to talk ♥♥♥♥ to heretics. Also, all of the enemies are modeled after their tabletop miniature counterparts to the smallest detail and they do feel like their tabletop counterparts. You see an Aspiring Champion bullrushing you with axes or a Terminator deepstriking to a safer location you know you're in for trouble. The weapons also feel incredibly satisfying, especially the Plasma with Gets Hot! rule carried to the game, Melta that just melts armor and the Heavy Bolter just going *chucka-chucka-chucka* on whatever is unfortunate enough to be infront of the 75 cal wall of lead.

If you are a Warhammer fan and want to see a game that does what it promises quite respectably AND have the source material faithfully respected, you will have a good time.

Metal: Hellsinger is a love-letter to metal music and high-octane shooters.

It is quite a short game, but memorable from start to finish with incredible musician collabs, STELLAR voice acting work from Troy Baker and Jennifer Hale and a metric ton of bullets.

I like the fact that the love letter to the metal genre is not a caricaturized mess filled to the brim with cheap jokes and crap stories. The plot is pretty simple but good and the general tone of the game is more or less "just keep shooting, I'll keep shredding in the background".

It is straightforward, it is fun, it is beautifully executed.

I was obssessed with the game before ACT II: IMPERFECT HATRED.

Now that I have finished it, I have a question:

How do you even come up with this ♥♥♥♥ Hakita? The story, the action, the music, the mechanics, the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ everything is top ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ notch.

If you could pick a single Early Access game that you could support for the rest of your lives, let it be this.

I always looked at the GG series from afar up until now. Not anymore, this ♥♥♥♥ is like crack.

Alright, grab your axes, wear your best wolf-pelt and polish that shield cause you're in for a ride.

Let's get to the reason why you're reading the reviews: There is a million survival games in the market and 90% of them are copy-pasted trash but your entire friendslist is playing this one, why?

Because Valheim is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome that's why.

Do you hate the tiresome mechanics of other survival games that push you to do menial stuff constantly? Well, some of that is here too, but everything comes with a good reward. I have always hated how stuff like hunger and thirst are always tacked on in horrid ways to survival games. In Valheim, those mechanics do not kill you, they just make you stronger for keeping your Viking well-fed.

How about combat, Straydog? It is grindy, it is brutal and it is terrifying. Every biome that matches your current gear level can and will ruin your day and the moment you enter the Swamps or the Mountains for the first time you will realize how quickly this game can go from a nice stroll in whimsical forests to straight up atmospheric horror. Seriously, I am sure my dear rear looks much better due to how much I've been clenching those muscles each time I see a Fuling, or encountered my first Serpent in the middle of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ocean with nowhere else to go. Then there's the bossfights which have no business being that grandiose for a game that is priced at two beers and sized at 500 mb.

If you're tired of slaughtering your way through the world and letting Odin know you're his finest, you can then settle down and build yourself a beautiful castle with one of the simplest but the most fun building systems out there.

If you've been looking for a survival game that isn't a messy bugfest or a slog that feels like having a second job, this game looks and plays pretty damn great even when in Early Access.

Alright, 60 hours and a million updates later it is about to update this review.
This team works hard, they are pushing updates one after the other and have been ever since their first steps.

Compared to my old review, there is now a total of 4 unique characters, 2 new bosses, new mechanics and rooms, a dozen new weapons and occult scrolls each (the thingies that make or break your build) and equally abundant balancing patches.

They are just taking a look at what works well for the game and double down on that while keeping their roadmap consistent, and I approved each time. Gunfire Reborn going stronger than ever.


----------------------------------------------OLD REVIEW---------------------------------------------------
It is, as everyone else already said, the right combination of Borderlands with Risk of Rain 2.

The gunplay is smooth and the controls are pretty responsive, weapons and skills really have that satisfying kick to them and you never feel like you are trying to hit the enemy with a napkin to kill them. Oh and variety of weapons and the random builds you can create around them are pretty great too. The two characters (with apparently more to come) are very different compared to each other and each are as effective as the other.

I do find the enemy types a bit samey at times (dude who rapid fires, dude who fires homing shots, dude who carries a shield and what not), except for those that are unique to their own stages but they are generally very unforgiving and fun to fight through anyway so it is not much of an issue. At the 28.9 hours mark I finally managed to finish the game in normal difficulty, and keeping me occupied for nearly 30 hours in a single week at this price point is something I am not going to argue with.

8/10 pretty damn good.